Blogroll

Meta

Month: March 2018

Isn’t it wonderful to have a day dedicated to playing jokes on each other? This post honors April Fool’s Day, a last vestige of festivals from Antiquity such as Saturnalia, where the social order turned upside down.

I began my hunt for the right word by a simple Google search, to find a synonym for “foolish.” Then, looking at “absurd,” I thought how absurd the nonsense word “google” is, having no etymology I could imagine other than a now-forgotten, and rather foolish, cartoon character. Thinking about Google, as well as using it did, however, give us a word for a very special day.My go-to for the history of words, The OED Online, suggests a dual French and Latin parentage for our word, with absurde indicating something “contrary to common sense.” That 14th Century continued into English, with the OED’s examples dating back as far as the 1500s. In Hamlet, we have this: “Fie, tis a fault to heauen, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd.”

Unless one is an Adsurdist artist, the absurd is, at best, done deliberately to have fun or make fun of others. Real fools, however, do not recognize their absurdity or even deliberately embark on foolhardy adventures. That sense of reason and absurdity being at odds stands today. That makes “absurd” anything but absurd in formal usage; so many terms drift but this one, like the fool who persists in foolishness, remains delightfully unchanged.

Next week we have a faculty-nominated word from the sciences. It enshrines reason to counteract our foolish pursuits. For now, however, be a bit absurd as you play harmless tricks on friends and family.

Update: This post troubled me because “absurd” does not seem to come from the word “surd” plus the “ab” affix. I found this list of words that employ “ab” in the sense of “away from,” as in “abnormal.” By coincidence, “ab” was the site’s “word root of the day.”

This word has bothered me for many years. It provides a good example of Edward Sapir’s theory of Linguistic Drift, and I warn writers to take care when using this intellectual-sounding adjective. It has drifted from a positive sense to a negative one and back to positive again!

Often I hear journalists on radio, or more likely corporate or governmental officials, describing the “fulsome praise” heaped upon this or that person. There’s a problem here; these speakers mean “generous” or “universal” when one older meaning of fulsome is, in fact, a little stinky. If we add the verb “heaped” it all becomes, well, piled higher and deeper in its fulsomeness.

The word is English and it is very old. The OED Online cites uses from as early as the 14th Century, and this lovely example a century closer to us, “As a fulsome well Shedith his stream in to þe ryvere” can be updated to, “as a fulsome well sheds its stream into the river.” Here the sense is copious, overflowing, positive. And therein lies a problem with “fulsome,” as well as its closeness, phonetically, to the unabashedly bad “foul.” The OED notes that fulsome acquired a dubious reputation thanks to that kinship, though in recent years the positive aspect of fulsome gained more usage.

A 19th Century example from the OED helps, “My complaint of the world..is this—that there is too much of everything..and so I could go on enumerating..all the things which are too full in this fulsome world. I use fulsome in the original sense.”

In this original sense, fulsome means “too much of a good thing.” It is one thing to be praised, another entirely to be fawned over by a sycophant. That sense of excess takes us to the OED’s other definitions. They include fleshy, obnoxious, overfed, lewd, bawdy, dirty, difficult to digest, filthy! In my mind’s eye I immediately envisioned the engravings of William Hogarth, whose “Tavern Scene” from the series “The Rake’s Progress” appears above. Try as I might, we are back to Spring Break Bacchanalia, after all!

An 1828 example from the OED is “the close, hot, fulsome smell of bad ventilation.” My 1953 edition of Webster’s New Collegiate gives no positive definitions, emphasizing only the offensive nature of the term. My more recent American Heritage Dictionary, a volume that includes usage notes, warns readers about the double-edged meaning of our word of the week.

We have lost most derogatory senses of the word, along with the noun form of fulsome, but I remain uncomfortable when I hear about “fulsome praise,” perhaps the last holdout of a word that describes excess in all its forms. Again, I am reminded of Hogarth’s satirical drawings. The Rake’s Progress did not end well.

We have here not a question of grammar or even proper usage but rather of precise usage. So the next time you plan to honor someone who had received a reward, you might instead talk or write about “universal praise,” “widely praised,” “acclaimed,” or “greatly honored.” I, for one, would leave “fulsome” behind, unless you want to poke fun at someone being followed around by a platoon of yes-men.

Update, 3/26/18: I took a peek at Bryan Garner’s excellent A Dictionary of American Usage for advice. He calls fulsome a “skunked term,” meaning that the scent of its earlier (in this case, negative) meaning clings to it for a long time. Garner suggests “lavish” as an alternative adjective when speaking of praise.

Special thanks to Lisa Bayard, Manger of Tyler’s at UR, for this excellent pick. After the Bacchanalia ends, we must return to our studies.

I teach a course entitled “Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” and students rightly assume that the final word has something to do with the theory of teaching. For many years, poor student of Classical languages that I am, I mistakenly assumed that the “peda” in our word related to the Latin pedestere, to go around on foot. One often follows a mentor, like ducklings following mom. So that was that, as far as my defining the origins of “pedagogy.”

How wrong I was! While pedestere gives us the modern “pedestrian,” my thinking was rather pedestrian indeed, not have have checked a few good dictionaries.

During Spring Break, I am far from my printed dictionaries in Boatwright Library on campus, but I have the OED Online to follow me, like those ducklings, wherever I go. Their entry shows a history stretching back to Ancient Greece and, later in the Mediterranean world, Latin paedagogia. In English, by the 17th Century a “pedagogy” could mean not only the art of teaching but also the profession itself or a place where teaching gets done.

Today we generally refer to the system or theory of teaching when we use the word as a noun or adjective, as in “we practiced several pedagogical techniques for teaching the history of language.” I have heard teachers called “pedagogues” in older books; that term has faded from common usage.

With Spring Breaks blooming like daffodils across America, I decided that I would nominate a word myself.

In case my choice gives offense, I admit–and dare hope–that most students will do community service, visit family, or engage in healthy and safe activities during their Spring Breaks. In my experience, I was too poor to go anywhere except right home.

Such a low-key respite from schoolwork is not, however, the reputation of the annual student holiday. In fact, we have an ancient and sacred ancestor for today’s decidedly profane revelries, a term that managed to survive two millennia without much alteration: Bacchanalia. Bacchus, the Roman god of “wine, freedom, intoxication and ecstasy” (Wikipedia), survives as well; he seems a less dangerous re-branding of the Greek Dionysus. In those earlier rites, people got ripped limb from limb by the followers of the god.

Bacchus’ festivals, purportedly still celebrated at every Spring Break hotspot, can be dangerous indeed. This must account for the negative sense in which the term and its synonym “bacchanal” have been used during my lifetime. As recently as 2016, at my alma mater The University of Virginia, an article in The Cavalier Daily reported on “this year’s Block Party — an unsanctioned bacchanal which took place on Wertland Street last Saturday.”

I leave the nature of the rites that constitute “excess,” up to readers’ discretion. More than one martini constitutes excess to me, these days, if not the drunken disasters so often synonymous with Bacchanalia. The OED Online traces that sense of the word, a secular version of the ancient partying, to the 17th Century. My other dictionaries also raise a glass in the same direction.

If you engage in singing about drinking, you will also be singing a “Bacchanal” or “Bacchanalia.” Those usages seem as lost to us now as the proverbial lost weekend.

So have a safe and sober Spring Break. Remember, as poet, printer, and mystic William Blake wrote, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” But only if you make it that far.

Special thanks to Rita Willett, MD, Healthcare Studies and Department of Biology, for our word this week. As with our word in the last post, “equanimity” is hard to say and even harder to spell, but it speaks volumes in print.

It provides just the right lexical item for a factious, even frightening time. The OED Online provides These definitions:

“The quality of having an even mind. . . .Fairness of judgement, impartiality, equity.”

Let’s try it in a medical sense, given our source: “Patients went beyond noting how the physician’s advice was medically sound; they emphasized her equanimity in treating the elderly with dignity.”

The term’s history reaches to the 17th Century, with public servant and private diarist Samuel Pepys using our word in much the same way we would today. If the term has fallen out of favor, I wonder if equanimity itself has waned? That virtue, as well as its signifier, deserve better.